A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family, Not Publishers (New York Times)
For years, Facebook has courted publishers of all sizes, asking them to depend more and more on the social media giant to expand their audiences. Now, Facebook has a new message for publishers: Tamp down your expectations. Mashable: Publishers should be worried about the Facebook news feed change.

Yelp Announces Expanding ‘Knowledge’ Social Analytics Platform (Marketing Land)
Yelp is expanding the group of third-party companies that can directly access its complete reviews data and is announcing a new program called “Yelp Knowledge.” The concept is that through Yelp data, multi-location brands and franchises won’t simply see reviews (e.g., 3.5 stars) but gain a more holistic sense of how their locations are performing and how customer sentiment is trending.

As Gannett Acquires ReachLocal, Some Lessons From Its U.K. Exit (Street Fight)
Charlie Flora: As news filtered out earlier this week that media giant Gannett had bought ReachLocal for $156 million, it capped off several years of speculation in the local marketing industry about where the public company would end up. As a former ReachLocal employee, I’ve watched the company as it has faced steep challenges

Google Launches Two New APIs to Improve App Intelligence and Context (Business Insider)
The two features, Snapshot API and Fence API, use seven different kinds of contextual feedback to give developers a better understanding of users’ behavior, including location, weather, user activity, and nearby beacons. Used together, these features will enable developers to provide more customized user experiences.

Here’s Why Instagram Doesn’t Offer SMBs a Buy-Now Button (AdWeek)
The vast majority of Instagram’s 200,000 advertisers, per the social media platform, are small-to-medium-sized businesses. But the Facebook-owned platform has been reluctant to offer end-to-end commerce, complete with a shopping cart and users’ stored credit card information — capabilities its parent, Amazon, Google and now Pinterest offer merchants.

Two Views of Community News — From 30,000 Feet and At Ground Level (Street Fight) Tom Grubisich: There are plenty of bad prognostications about the future of the community news business out there. But if you look at what is actually happening company by company, site by site, the view is not universally grim. There are a number of players making serious progress in digital revenue.

DoorDash, Going Beyond Food Delivery, Will Soon Deliver Alcohol (TechCrunch)
DoorDash started off as a restaurant delivery company — but, like many on-demand delivery companies, its ambitions are certainly much higher than that. And it’s taking one step beyond food delivery today by adding the ability to purchase alcohol through DoorDash.

YAP’s Beacon Just Wants Your Shopping to Be Fun (ReadWrite)
Trevor Curwin: Launched in 2014, South Korea-based Yap is a location-based integrated online-to-offline (O2O) commerce and payments platform — and now, that means beacons. YAP may be a concept whose time is now, especially in North America. The battle in the payments arena will likely focus on “beacons versus NFC” in the near future.